The A-Zs that rocked 2021: Entertainment powerhouse Asia

SINGAPORE - Three trends converged this year: the pandemic made everyone stay home more, the selection of streaming goodies jumped and audiences around the world woke up to the idea that there is more to filmed entertainment than Hollywood.

In February, the Disney+ platform launched in Singapore. Its arrival was highly anticipated because it is a streaming service with a catalogue to match that of Netflix, which arrived here in 2016.

A Disney+ subscription would not just open doors to Marvel superhero movies and Pixar animation works. Through its additional-fee Premier Access plan, newly released superhero movies like Black Widow could be watched at home, with the films becoming free to subscribers shortly afterwards.

This attention-grabbing strategy had a knock-on effect.

Rival media company WarnerMedia released its science-fiction epic Dune free to Singapore subscribers of its HBO Go service only weeks after its release here, while it was still playing in cinemas.

In a year of unprecedented numbers in entertainment, one stands out: 903 million. That amount in US dollars, so tantalisingly close to one billion, is the domestic box- office take of the 2021 war movie The Battle At Lake Changjin in its home country, China.

The movie is not just the highest-grossing work ever in China, but it is also the highest-grossing non-English film of all time, anywhere. In global box-office rank, it stands at No. 62, above the fantasy Lord Of The Rings: Fellowship Of The Ring (2001) and below the biopic Bohemian Rhapsody (2018).

The war drama did not do great numbers outside China, however. But this might change because this year, non-English shows such as South Korean products like the Netflix thriller series Squid Game and Hellbound topped the charts around the world.

The shows shattered Anglocentric myths, such as the belief that white actors are the only route to global success, or that the only concentration of talent capable of making a global hit resides in Los Angeles, with New York, London and Sydney closely following.

This year, the success of Hellbound and Squid Game, along with Lake Changjin's record-breaking revenue, proves that barriers to global success for Asian films are not as solid as they once appeared.